Friday, May 29, 2015

Sweet Blues: A Film about
Mike Bloomfield, a DVD
included with the CD set From His Head to
His Heart to His Hands, features an undated audio interview with the blues
guitarist (who died in 1981). In it Bloomfield recounts his experiences playing
rowdy clubs in Chicago in the early 1960s.

Bloomfield: I’d be up there playing and some dude would
pull a gun on another dude and another dude would pull a knife on another dude
and the whole band would hide. Oh man, I remember a time I was standing at a
bar and a guy walked in and he took a woman’s head and slammed it on the bar
top. He said, “Bartender, get this bitch a beer.” Well, that freaked everybody
out. That was just --

Interviewer: How would she recover from it?

Bloomfield (astonished at the interviewer’s
obtuseness): Her head! Her severed head!

This tall tale is immediately followed by clips from
his ex-wife and his friend, blues harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite.

Susan Beuhler: I don’t think of Michael as a liar because
I always knew if he was telling the truth or not. But I think most everybody
considered Michael the biggest liar they’ve ever met and they would never trust
anything that he ever said.

Charlie Musselwhite: I never knew when he was telling
the truth or lying because he could tell both equally well.

These pieces of meat are at the center of a social
media mishap. The video purporting to show Ukrainian soldiers using chainsaws
to cut up frozen carcasses has gone viral after social media users accused the
Ukrainian government of feeding soldiers decades old meat.

Many believed the combination of numbers 10-01-68,
stamped on to the carcasses, indicated the date when the meat was butchered.

China famous for having all, making all, has now been
reported to have made rice out of plastic and has distributed it.

The Korean-language Weekly Hong Kong in Hong Kong
quoted Singapore media that “Fake rice made out of plastic is massively sold on
the Chinese market.”

According to the report, some distributors are selling
fake rice in Taiyuan, Shaanxi Province, and this rice is a mixture of potatoes,
sweet potatoes and plastic.

“This ‘plastic rice’ is made by forming potatoes and
sweet potatoes into rice-like shape, then adding industrial synthetic resins,”
said a food expert. “Since the rice is different from normal rice, it is hard
like stone even when cooked. Moreover, the synthetic resin in it is very
harmful to the human body.”

One Chinese restaurant association official warns that
eating three bowls of ‘plastic rice’ is the same as eating one vinyl bag. He
added that since the rice is very dangerous there would be strict investigation
on the rice factory. […]

House of Representatives (DPR) deputy speaker Agus
Hermanto says the circulation of synthetic or “plastic” rice at markets could
be an inside ploy to disrupt food supplies and create public dissent toward the
government.

The suspicion, the Democratic Party lawmaker said, was
because synthetic rice is reportedly more expensive to produce than regular
rice, making the emergence of the problem itself odd.

“Don’t just look at the fact that plastic rice comes
from imports. The polemic could have a domestic political motive so that food
supplies will be disrupted and stir public anger toward the government,” Agus
told reporters on Tuesday at the House of Representatives complex. […]

The government announced on Tuesday that a round of
official laboratory tests found no plastic substances in controversial rice
samples from Bekasi, West Java.

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo held a meeting on
Tuesday to discuss the results with National Police Gen. Badrodin Haiti, Trade
Minister Rachmat Gobel and Food and Drug Monitoring Agency (BPOM) head Roy
Sparringa before the government made the public announcement.

Unlike the results from tests done recently by
state-owned PT Sucofindo, which confirmed that the rice contained polyvinyl
chloride (PVC), the tests conducted by the laboratories of the police, the
BPOM, the Trade Ministry and the Agriculture Ministry showed negative results
for plastic substances, Badrodin announced after the meeting. […]